Is IE such a bad thing?

[SpikeyBush]

There's no shortage of bad publicity when it comes to Microsoft products. Is the source of much of this Bill's bank balance? Here is my observation:
I can't tax my car with Google Chrome
I can't watch Sky Player with Google Chrome
I can't check my e-mails with Mozilla Firefox
but I can do everything with IE

[ChuckFickens]

It's the popularity (read acquired user-ship) of IE that makes it a target and therefore the most hacked browser.

[venator]

You don't have to use one browser exclusively, that's the answer.

Just as you might walk somewhere, or take a taxi or a bus, you select what suits you for a particular purpose.

IE has lots of baggage, and it's clunky, but any website has to work on it.
Chrome is slim and much faster.
Firefox is better than IE, and falls in the middle.

There's no winner - use whatever's good for your purpose.

[beso]

Generally problems experienced with particular browsers are down to the site design using non-standard code. It isn't really the browser's fault.

For a long time the extension of html features have been undertaken by the separate browser development teams in isolation and consequently the newest features have not been standardised through much of the history of the web.

Site developers often make use of the new features in a particular browser without considering how they will work in other browsers. Eventually the best of the features get incorporated into the standard and are adopted by all but it causes strife in the meantime.

IE tends to be better supported because most of the developers who can't be bothered checking the performance on different browsers design it only for IE. However there are no doubt others too who design for Firefox without enough attention to IE.

Others put in code so that different browsers get different instructions. Unfortunately this code is sometimes left in place too long and what was appropriate for IE6 or IE7 is now wrong for IE8 or IE9 but the code cannot distinguish these later versions. This is a common cause of poor rendering with later versions of IE.

Fortunately standards are now keeping closer to the development and browser programmers are maintaining better compliance and consistency. The website development community is still lagging but there is hope for progress at least with more standardisation among browsers.

Much of the bad publicity about IE is driven by aggressive proponents of Firefox who tend to be profoundly bigoted. Many of them have not even used IE since IE6 and their comparisons with Firefox are based on that experience.

They also like to promote the myth that Firefox is more secure. In fact Firefox does not use an advanced feature available in Windows Vista and Window 7. This feature is called Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) and it tightly controls the ability of a program to write to the disk in a way that is very difficult to circumvent. The only browsers to use this technology are IE7,8 & 9 and Google Chrome.

[Gromit]

IE9 looks rather impressive from what I have seen. IE suffers a bad reputation from previous versions. IE6 and to some extend IE7 were just awful. Full of holes, did not follow web standards and was a buggy as hell.

// I can't tax my car with Google Chrome
I can't watch Sky Player with Google Chrome
I can't check my e-mails with Mozilla Firefox
but I can do everything with IE //

Strange, I can do all of those things in those browsers.